The Damaged Feminist

Posted on | January 25, 2015 | 44 Comments

Emily McCombs is a recovering addict with tattoos and a pierced nose, not to mention a history of bulimia and sexual perversion, so it only makes sense that she is executive editor of the feminist blog XOJane.com. Feminism is a movement of “broken people” who blame “society” for their misfortunes and thus feel compelled to avenge themselves by destroying civilization as we know it.

Now in her early 30s, McCombs confesses that she was an alcoholic, used “cocaine daily for several years” and spent “over a decade as an on-again-off-again bulimic.” As weird as that is, such symptoms of psychiatric abnormality are rather commonly found in the solipsistic “personal-is-political” narratives that feminists write when they aren’t too busy ranting about patriarchal oppression. Like so many other damaged women, McCombs rationalizes her lunatic life as a reaction to “trauma”:

I accept that I made these decisions, although I don’t know that I had much choice — I was so young and had experienced so much trauma that I was probably using the only tools I knew of to survive. . . .
However I explain my past, I have to accept the consequences of my actions.

What manner of “trauma” did Emily McCombs experience? It seems to have been mainly self-inflicted, as she elsewhere confesses:

I started having sex with adult men when I was 13 years old.
Neglected at home and ostracized at school, I found comfort in the sexual attentions of older men. Unlike boys my own age, who cruelly taunted me, older men were nice to me. Unlike my emotionally distant father, older men paid attention to me.

She packs an awful lot of self-pity into those four sentences. Her family “neglected” her, she was “ostracized at school,” boys her age “cruelly taunted” her, her father was “emotionally distant,” and so McCombs is entirely blameless for her adolescent promiscuity.

This is not self-awareness. It’s rationalization.

Feminism provides a political context within which women can exculpate themselves for every problem in their lives. Whatever a woman may do to contribute to her own unhappiness, she can never be blamed — because patriarchy! Male supremacy is the Swiss Army Knife of feminist theory, a universal explanatory tool capable of turning any misfortune in a woman’s life into proof of her victimhood.

Somewhere in Oklahoma, Emily McCombs’ relatives and former schoolmates must be humiliated by her denunciations of them, and this is another function of feminism: Revenge against all the people the damaged woman blames for her unhappy childhood.

Of course, there are men who had unhappy childhoods, men who were neglected at home and cruelly taunted in school, men with histories of substance abuse and sexual perversion, men with tattoos and piercings and a tendency toward self-pity, but no man has access to the rationalization of feminism, which automatically turns women’s unhappiness into a political casus belli, an ideology of revolution.

But please, Ms. McCombs, tell us more about your “trauma”:

I created Prodigy chat rooms with names like “13yo girl home alone” and spent hours chatting and having phone sex with the men who would find me there. I “dated” men in their 20s and 30s that I met at the movie theater, online or hanging around local college town with my other underage girlfriends. I pursued these relationships with with Lolita-like abandon. The terrifying thing is how few adult men ever said no.
I was not coerced. I consented to all these sexual encounters in the basest sense of the world. But I was making choices that I wasn’t emotionally equipped to make.

Well, of course not. Whatever she did, she was not responsible.

The patriarchy made her do it. Blame her “emotionally distant” father and the boys who taunted her in school, and also blame the men who did to Emily McCombs what she wanted them to do:

I was 25 before I realized that every man I’d slept with as a teenager was a pedophile. It seemed to me that since I’d courted the attention, that I was fully culpable. What teenager believes she is not mentally or emotionally capable of full consent? . . .
I thought I was the exception for these men, the girl so precocious and advanced that it superseded social norms. . . .
Once, I met a 28-year-old man online and went to his house for a “date.” He began to undress me almost immediately — I went along with it because I wanted him to like me, and our sexual encounter culminated with him holding my head down and ejaculating into my throat while I sputtered and struggled to pull away. Later, I couldn’t understand why he never called me again, why he didn’t want to be my boyfriend.

The patriarchy is to blame, because the patriarchy is always to blame for whatever feminists want to complain about.

Were you a lonely teenage girl? The patriarchy!

Did men ejaculate into your throat? The patriarchy!

Did the men you had sex with never call you again? The patriarchy!

One wonders what story Emily McCombs would be telling if her parents had caught her slipping out for a rendezvous with her Internet “boyfriends” and punished her. Probably she would be condemning her parents for their “anti-sex” attitudes, blaming them for “repressing” her adolescent liberation. Feminism is incompatible with personal responsibility, so that whatever a woman’s problem may be, she herself is never to blame. Her unhappiness cannot possibly be her own fault, and if feminism thereby creates a handy excuse for the reckless promiscuity of hot-to-trot teenage girls, so what? As long as the emotionally damaged survivors of self-inflicted “trauma” grow up and join the crusade to destroy civilization as we know it, feminists will count that as a “win.”

Readers will perhaps be comforted to know that Emily McCombs recently adopted a boy. Or perhaps you will be horrified.

Haters!

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

Comments

44 Responses to “The Damaged Feminist”

Evi L. Bloggerlady
January 25th, 2015 @ 10:55 pm

http://s.mlkshk-cdn.com/r/79TQ
PoliWach
January 25th, 2015 @ 11:02 pm

Imagine how her complaints would sound to muslim women in the middle east who have been circumcised?
Zanshi
January 25th, 2015 @ 11:05 pm

Sounds almost like Anita Sarkeesian and her beta-male producer.
M. Thompson
January 25th, 2015 @ 11:21 pm

Far too many of these female persons claim backgrounds of hardship and woe.

It is an appeal to emotion, and it cloaks their true intentions.
CrustyB
January 25th, 2015 @ 11:30 pm

“I was a teenager, I met a man in his late twenties on the Internet, and it was abusive.”

We have met the enemy…
ROBERT STACY MCCAIN: “Feminism is a movement of ‘broken people’ who blame ‘society’ for their misfortunes and thus feel compelled to avenge themselves by destroying civilization as we know it.” – the Revision Division
January 25th, 2015 @ 11:37 pm

[…] ROBERT STACY MCCAIN: “Feminism is a movement of ‘broken people’ who blame ‘society’ for the… […]
IceBerg77
January 25th, 2015 @ 11:40 pm

You really don’t think trauma had anything to do with her lifestyle choices at age 13?
TefExpat
January 26th, 2015 @ 12:18 am

Unlike women, very few men could be so promiscuous, even if they wanted to be.
Jim R
January 26th, 2015 @ 12:25 am

Part of me feels sorry for her. Living in her head must be pretty miserable.

Part of me wonders about her parents. “Emotionally distant”? Sounds like they were effectively absent. Did they never notice that she was “out” quite a lot for a girl her age? Did they never wonder where she was? I sometimes joke about planning to run my daughter’s life like a police state… only I’m not entirely joking. I regard it as part of my job to know where she is, with whom, and what they are doing 24 / 7. Apparently, Combs père didn’t see it that way. Too bad.

But most of me has contempt for her. She is one sick puppy, and her best move is to come to grips with what she’s done wrong and stop blaming other people.

And somebody let her adopt a child???? Good grief, when we did that, I had to go through a tougher background check than I did when I got a low-level security clearance years ago. What idiot turned a child over to this lunatic????
Jim R
January 26th, 2015 @ 12:27 am

I’ll give them credit for “honesty”: they really THINK that they’ve got backgrounds of “hardship and woe”. Maybe they have. In Combs’ case, it sounds 100% self-inflicted.
TefExpat
January 26th, 2015 @ 12:31 am

North Korea?
Jim R
January 26th, 2015 @ 12:35 am

I see your point, but I think it comes down to different definitions of “trauma”. It sounds like they could well be the sort of hippie-esque “Like, we, you know, totally, like, let her find her own way, man” parents who wanted to be her friend and so let her do whatever she wanted with no supervision much less criticism or repercussions*. For the right kid, that MIGHT have worked; how many kids are raised by parents who aren’t around because they work two jobs yet don’t turn out to be lunatics? In Combs’ case, it clearly didn’t.

I also wonder a bit about the “emotionally distant” father. I don’t excuse him, but it MAY be that he was “distant” because he was dealing with a lunatic who pushed him away. What is a modern parent to do? Punish the kids too much and it’s a visit from DSS, they’re gone to foster care and you’re (perhaps) off to jail.

I’d like to know what her parents have to say about all of this.

(*) My niece is 19. She’s told me about some of her school friends who sound very like this Combs: parents who were overly permissive with the result that their daughters are aimless, into drugs and casual sex and other dangerous behaviors, and generally off to a VERY bad start in adulthood.
Fail Burton
January 26th, 2015 @ 12:40 am

As usual, failure describes itself but blames others. What this woman is describing is not the failures of others but the dangers of self-pity, one of the single most destructive acts a human can indulge in. Unfortunately for those who embrace radical feminism, it is an ideology devoted to self-pity and in the end that translates into supremacy and even racism. In other words, it is an ideology that can never solve a single thing. It portrays itself as an analogy to Jim Crow but there is a problem: there is nothing like that. Feminists have only windmills and here-today-gone-tomorrow forms of logic that fix the straight white male in place like a bull’s-eye.

It’s interesting how all feminist views revolve around the idea of the “normative” as an oppressor. What feminists never seem to notice is they complain there is either no access to that or too much. In other words radical feminism is nothing more than a childish blame game hardened into a formal ideology with rules that are the opposite of a strike zone; males always strike out, women never do.

Failure describes itself but can never be measured, because who knows how many pyramids and great canals such people never produce.
Fail Burton
January 26th, 2015 @ 12:49 am

Not if she lied and said she was going out with friends or to a friend’s house and they covered for her. Or maybe she skipped school and went to the mall.
Fail Burton
January 26th, 2015 @ 12:51 am

This all got started and coddled by Oprah when she’d routinely have women on her show who didn’t really go through all that much and they were always “survivors,” like they’d survived D-Day. Weaker sex talks like weaker sex is weaker sex.
Finrod Felagund
January 26th, 2015 @ 12:56 am

As Weird Al put it, First World Problems:
US.Patriot1776
January 26th, 2015 @ 1:13 am

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-H7sqH1DY7qc/VKXY_Vfw_VI/AAAAAAAAVEM/tuJPTkyo_ts/s1600/fem.jpg
K-Bob
January 26th, 2015 @ 1:31 am

If you’re emotionally challenged (or whatever PC term for “nucking futs” floats your boat), joining a “movement” is probably a bad idea.

But I guess it’s cheaper than therapy.
concern00
January 26th, 2015 @ 3:12 am

I believe the definition of feminist is damaged. Once there might have been a grander, nobler cause, but today it’s just a collective of damaged goods determined to milk progressivism for all they can get from their victim-hood status. Unfortunately, as a society, we tend to give credence to their derangement and shower them in honors and praise.
Zohydro
January 26th, 2015 @ 6:19 am

…except for those “men” who fancy themselves as submissive homosexuals!
Fail Burton
January 26th, 2015 @ 6:37 am

As might be expected from the affirmative action/diversity division of the Ku Klux Klan, notice how there is never a sense of a shared humanity in any single thing a modern gender feminist says. There is only the implacable foe. The literature such a cult might produce would find Matriarchal Hobbits venturing into Mordor to throw the Marriage Ring into a volcano. Only when we can plainly show this cult to be the neo-Nazi-like entity it really is can it be delegitimized. Nationwide, any single move a straight white male makes is attacked. It doesn’t matter if it’s a book display, the Oscars or a toy store, this aggressive complaint-factory never takes a single day off. The sooner their active mainstreaming of hate speech into the public arena is banished the better off this country will be.
RS
January 26th, 2015 @ 7:10 am

One reads such things and is at a loss to know what to think. Is her personal narrative accurate? Perhaps. It seems equally likely, however, that it could be embellished in order to provide instant credibility with those from whom she currently seeks approval.

There are certainly rebellious teens who make bad choices; there are certainly rebellious teens who justify those choices by placing blame upon parents, classmates, etc., because we’ve fostered a society where everything is pathology and nothing is a free-will ****-up. Ms. McCombs wouldn’t be the first to try to parlay an exaggerated personal history into money and accolades.

That said, if she’s being 100% truthful, I feel pity for her. She’s destined for continued personal difficulty unless and until she develops some self-awareness.
Spang Nation
January 26th, 2015 @ 8:06 am

[…] of the best ways to counter feminism – other than Robert Stacy McCain’s usual philosophical trashing of it – is to live […]
Dana
January 26th, 2015 @ 8:34 am

Her rationale is typical:

I accept that I made these decisions, although I don’t know that I had much choice — I was so young and had experienced so much trauma that I was probably using the only tools I knew of to survive.

She damned well had a choice, and a strong woman would have known it.

This is the part that gets me: we all have problems in our lives — some more than others — but I refuse to accept the notion that people who take bad decisions have no other choices. If she doesn’t have enough sense or willpower to not be able to choose not to use cocaine or be bulimic, then she isn’t mentally competent enough to be allowed to vote!
Dana
January 26th, 2015 @ 8:40 am

They may have been worthless, but that isn’t necessarily the evidence of it. With the internet, she was able to “meet” ~~men~~ males, and many of them were obviously within walking distance; it doesn’t sound like the “date” she described took all that long. In and out, blow-and-go, and I hope you don’t mind if I put these pictures on the internet.
Dana
January 26th, 2015 @ 8:42 am

I’d guess that if you “fancy yourself” as a submissive homosexual, then you really are a submissive homosexual.
Dana
January 26th, 2015 @ 8:45 am

Actually, from what little our host has quoted, these sound a lot like daytime “dates.” Sweet young thing, just home from school, “Hey, mom, I’m going over to Christina’s house!” and instead she meets the guy who throat f’s her. It didn’t take long at all, so she was hardly missed.
Dana
January 26th, 2015 @ 8:50 am

Pity? Sometimes pity is best expressed by telling the hard truth, and the hard truth that only she is responsible for herself.

OK, she had a bad life, most of it self-inflicted, but now it’s time to grow the f up, take responsibility for your own actions, and try to live a decent life from here on out.

That’s where the real problem is: she had a fornicated up life — quite literally, it would seem — but to get her life straightened out, it’s time to not go feminist on us, but to try to live a decent, normal, respectable life. She needs to find a husband — not a live-in boyfriend — build a decent life, have kids of their own, and rear them better than she was brought up herself.

Christianity forgives, but Christianity also shows the way to live after you have asked forgiveness.
RS
January 26th, 2015 @ 9:10 am

No disagreement from me, assuming she’s being truthful. My pity is predicated upon the simple fact that her “solution,” i.e. embracing feminism, is not going to solve her problems. Solutions require an acknowledgment of the the origins of the problem. As you point out, Christianity presents solutions, but it requires the self-awareness–call it conviction in the supernatural sense–that we’re individually flawed. I pity her and those who are incapable or unwilling to seek that truth.
robertstacymccain
January 26th, 2015 @ 10:15 am

Look: I was an out-of-control long-haired teenage dopehead who flipped out on psilocybin my sophomore year in college, so it’s not as if I am without sympathy for people whose adolescence was a blur of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. However, only women are provided with the ennobling mantle of feminist victimhood and allowed to blame others for their youthful folly.

There is a continuum, you see, between McCombs’ tale of her reckless jailbait promiscuity — she was actively pursuing older men, but now retroactively brands them all “pedophiles” — and the way college girls are being encouraged to re-remember any unfortunate drunken hookup as “rape.” It’s all part of the way feminism exempts women from responsibility by blaming males for their problems.
RS
January 26th, 2015 @ 10:29 am

Again, no disagreement. Pathology is icky and personal. Politics and/or social movements are clubs where all the cool people hang out.
Dana
January 26th, 2015 @ 10:52 am

I would not have expected a professional journalist to use a redundancy in his article headline.
Dana
January 26th, 2015 @ 10:54 am

But, as noted above, you got your life straightened out without blaming other people, by accepting your sins and your personal responsibility, and by being Christian.
Zohydro
January 26th, 2015 @ 10:58 am

I’d not thought of it that way, I guess…
Fail Burton
January 26th, 2015 @ 11:59 am

I’m not having any trouble. Hate groups and genuine anti-oppression movements share one thing in common: they claim an oppressor. What’s the chances Jews were oppressing Nazis or that in this instance men are a Jim Crow? I’m continually amazed at how successful gender feminism is at selling this con game 100 years after women having had the right to vote given to them. Gender feminism is like a cowbird that destroys the eggs in a different specie’s nest and lays their own. In this case intersectionalism claims the same space as equal rights feminism but the actual ideology they are selling is more like the American Nazi Party.

Normal humans critique such broad cultural strokes in terms of shared human failings. Hate groups will go straight to Jews, men or blacks.
David, internet troll
January 26th, 2015 @ 2:19 pm

I would agree with you on almost all of your points Stacy, but… How often have you run the articles about the female teachers having sex with underage boys? In her retrospective view, she is clearly making a lot of excuses, but she is correct in characterization of the men sleeping with her when she was 13, and we, as a society, have made the decision that at that age, she was not capable of informed consent, so I have to give her a pass on the early sexual activity thing.

After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
RS
January 26th, 2015 @ 3:25 pm

. . . we, as a society, have made the decision that at that age, she was not capable of informed consent, so I have to give her a pass on the early sexual activity thing.

That thought occurred to me, as well. The problem is, with adulthood, she seems to have gained no insight. Her personal narrative is a mish-mash of memes, grievances and accusations, instead of demonstrating an attempt to have a personal epiphany.

Indeed, there are adults who prey upon adolescents. There are also adolescents who are rebellious. Our society sends so many mixed messages to teens–deliberately, because that is the Progressive Left’s modus operandi–that it’s no wonder these people continue to be shells of normal human beings for most of their lives.
daialanye
January 26th, 2015 @ 4:54 pm

If only there were a pill to cure stupidity, if merely temporarily.
Daniel Freeman
January 26th, 2015 @ 5:31 pm

I see your point, but we need to make some distinctions.

1. A preference for early adolescents is hebephilia. The main difference is that it isn’t necessarily unnatural, seeing as it could serve an evolutionary purpose.

2. The men that she had sex with were possibly just indiscriminate, not even hebephiles. There is a certain stereotypical arc to stories about teachers that have sex with boys, that does not include face-effing them once and never calling them again.

3. Those stories highlight the hypocrisy that exposes the true, ugly, man-hating face of our culture, because of the contrast with the reaction when the sexes are reversed. That would be true even if our host had a thing for teenagers himself.

4. We outlaw it as a society and taboo it as a culture because we were all teenagers once, so we all know damn well how much we overestimated our intelligence. We didn’t even know enough to properly estimate the extent of our ignorance, and we had more hormones than sense. That’s perfectly normal, so we collectively perform an intertemporal negotiation and protect our younger selves from our older selves.

5. On the other hand, we individually need to take responsibility for our own actions. Simply imagine if she catted around with boys her own age instead. It might have gone a little differently, but probably not worse, except that she wouldn’t be able to blame it all on them now.
Squid Hunt
January 26th, 2015 @ 5:47 pm

I remember when I was a teenager, I was skinny and had no muscle tone. I used to cruise the urban black neighborhoods and when I saw a group of dangerous looking gang members standing around, I would jump out of my car and taunt them. I would flash large amounts of hundred dollar bills at them. Even when they approached me, I just threw my keys at them and called them sissies. They all beat me up. Every single group of them. I wouldn’t stop until they had me down on the sidewalk broken and bleeding.
…I had no idea how much black people hate white people.
Jeanette Victoria
January 26th, 2015 @ 10:13 pm

Progressive will call her brave and will continue to smear Holly Fisher

BTW isn’t Damaged Feminist redundant?
Jeanette Victoria
January 26th, 2015 @ 10:17 pm

What person hasn’t had some adversity in their life? Sorry not too much sympathy from me either.
PeterP
January 27th, 2015 @ 7:46 am

All radical left wing movements — not just feminism — are sanctuaries for social misfits and the mentally unstable. As Alinsky said, they recruit people who will “corrupt their conscience for the cause.”
News of the Week (February 1st, 2015) | The Political Hat
February 1st, 2015 @ 5:49 pm

[…] The Damaged Feminist Emily McCombs is a recovering addict with tattoos and a pierced nose, not to mention a history of bulimia and sexual perversion, so it only makes sense that she is executive editor of the feminist blog XOJane.com. Feminism is a movement of “broken people” who blame “society” for their misfortunes and thus feel compelled to avenge themselves by destroying civilization as we know it. […]